15 June 2012

Since early age I've been fascinated with politics and the eternal melee around the steering of the common future. In many ways it resembles chess, a game that I much appreciate, were each side lays a series of tactics supporting a final strategy. Last week we had a display of political chess at its best, justifying once more my passion. In chess sometimes a player that had been losing material and apparently getting cornered to his half board can pull out an unexpected play that by exploring some weakness in the opponent's back defence can give him back the initiative. It was more or less that that Angela Merkel achieved by directly calling for a European Federation last week, exploring the fact that François Holland, her main opponent today, had to associate himself with euro-sceptics in his road to the French presidency.

Irrespective of her faith in her words, as usual Angela Merkel got the timing wrong. She says the federation has to be built in the next 5 years, but Europe doesn't have even 5 months, it might not even have 5 days. This call for a European Federation should have been issued 4 years ago, in the wake of the credit freeze. The elections in Greece this Sunday may just mark another moment when events overcome Angela Merkel, sending her back to the defensive.

13 June 2012

In my first look on Ubuntu 12.04 I got the impression that everything went fine with the upgrade from version 11.10. And indeed during a few weeks things went as smoothly as before. Until last week. I had to test an old project and got complains about the database connection. This database is managed by MySQL, hence I tried to access it with MySQL Administrator, which, lo and behold, wasn't installed any more. Though zombie icons still remained within the launcher and main menu, all packages related to MySQL had been disabled by the upgrade. There you go Ubuntu, you did it again!

My first reaction was simply to search for available packages, and indeed version 5.5 of MySQL is available in the repositories for this new Ubuntu release. I immediately proceeded to the install command, with it that starting a painful journey to get MySQL back on Ubuntu.

03 June 2012

On the evening of the first day of the 10th conference of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas (ASPO), in Vienna, Rembrandt asked me if I'd write again the usual summary. My immediate answer was "No". Lack of time and motivation let me far from such undertaking. Hours later a title popped up in my mind; the dead time at airports and air planes provided the necessary space for the content.

The title "last conference" can be interpreted in varied ways. It can refer simply to the latest, it can also allude to this being the last ever, or even the last I'll ever attend. I haven't quite decided which is it. Below the fold is a short account of my feelings about ASPO 10, may it shed some light on the title.